TunnelBear Review

Summary:

The Internet without restrictions. Sounds fun, doesn’t it? Well, that is what TunnelBear aims to provide with its slick and simple VPN for various kinds of operating systems. This Canada-based VPN provider aims to reach out to the audience that doesn’t know much about VPNs but wants to avail all the advantages provided in the environment set up by them. The company headquartered in Toronto is completely self-funded and provides a VPN service with a great value for money.

With TunnelBear, you can ‘tunnel’ your internet connection to another country where restrictions on the internet are much less so that you can enjoy the virtual experience with complete anonymity and full freedom. With an expanding network, it allows you to navigate through all your favourite sites by bypassing restrictions and keeping your identity unidentified. Your anonymity on the internet keeps you safe from advertisers, and tracking by other companies.

Features

Like most of its contemporaries, TunnelBear offers the same number of features for all its packages. And similarly enough, the same rule applies – if you sign up for a longer time, you naturally get a greater discount. It offers a free trial of 500 MB a month, where you can explore its various features. That isn’t much if you are planning to stream videos with it. If you are using the free version, you can get a 1 GB download limit, over and above the one promised to you, provided that you tweet about them. Other than this, there are two plans that you can avail of.

No discussion on Virtual Private Networks is complete without talking about how secure the connections provided by it are. TunnelBear vows to shield your personal information from third parties and hackers that are lurking around using an AES 256-bit encryption. For the iOS devices, they use IPSec. For those who don’t know, the IPSec or the Internet Protocol Security is a set of protocols that adds a tough layer of security by allowing secure communication between two or more hosts by authentication and encryption of each session.

TunnelBear has a complete ‘no-logs’ service. You can go through their Privacy Policy where they outline the personal details that they are going to collect, and the way in which they want to use it. These mostly include ‘Operational Data’ required to operate their services like the version of the OS, the version of the TunnelBear App used by the user, and other such relevant details. If the concerned user is making a purchase using a credit card, then TunnelBear collects the financial details necessary to carry out the transaction. It doesn’t store the IP addresses or any information regarding applications, services, or websites that the user is using.

In simple words, TunnelBear does not collect anything excess of what it needs to, and this is well stated in their detailed Privacy Policy:

“As a provider of an online privacy service, we ultimately strive to collect the minimal amount of information required to operate our service. This often means difficult trade-offs between the information we collect and the performance of our service. We believe that extraordinary openness and transparency around the data we collect, why we collect it and how we handle it can be a foundation of trust in our service. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on this evolving document.”

Exploiting its reputation as an extremely user-friendly and simple VPN provider, TunnelBear has been able to attract the likes of almost 5 million users from over 179 countries worldwide. Started in 2011, it supports a range of platforms including the desktop Operating Systems Mac and Windows, along with Android and iOS. Recently, it launched extensions from Google Chrome and Opera. The extension offers VPN-style features, which allows you to shield all your internet activity. It’s mostly an encrypted proxy, which limits the activities within the browser and not the activity of the device as a whole. It uses Chrome’s encryption and encrypts through AES 128-bit.

It allows you to enjoy browsing from almost 20 countries in the world. And what’s important is that you do not need to pay heed to any censorship offered by the geological location. The countries included are United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Japan, France, Spain, Singapore, Australia, and much more.

It provides connections with great speed, which can be used to overpower your ISP’s efforts of slowing down your internet connection.

Pricing Plans

Their monthly Giant Bear plan is priced at 6.99$ per month; while the yearly plan costs 4.16$ per month. It’s called the Grizzly plan, and if you want to pay the entire cost for the year, then you have to make a payment of 49.99$ in total. Thus, price wise the VPN provider is quite affordable and offers a competitive service. Funnily, they insist that you can pay them with Jars of Honey.

To know more about this seemingly absurd proposition, contact them to know about the latest ‘Jar of Honey’ to US dollar conversion rate. However, if implementable, this may not turn out to be very cost effective.

Customer Support

They have an easily approachable customer care policy with a tab that allows you to ask questions whenever you want to. There is a team of ‘Support Bears’ to look into your needs. Plus, they reach out to their users through a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Here’s what they have to say:

“If at any time you have a question about our records containing your Personal Information, we will do our best to answer it. You have the right to be told about the kind of Personal Information we maintain and how it is used. Upon request, we will provide you with information regarding the existence, use and disclosure of your Personal Information.”

Conclusion

The preference of 5 million users for TunnelBear is something completely justified. Glancing through the features of TunnelBear, one will realise there isn’t anything to hate here. They tick all the boxes – a user-friendly approach, competent speed, well-encrypted software to protect you from external threats, and all in all, a safe and convenient Internet experience. So, what are you waiting for – if it is a VPN that you need, then go and get hold of TunnelBear. It won’t disappoint you!